This is the most complicated of the store building methods because five different entities (or six if you have an associate program) have to interact to make the transaction work. You better be prepared for some frustration and delays making it all work. Believe me, I know. This is the way I built my first Speaker Shop and I’ll never do it again. It was a total nightmare.
I was already a Visa/MasterCard/AMEX merchant, so at least I didn't have to fight with that from the start. The first thing I had to do was find out from my bank what credit card processing company they used and what Internet “real time” (see box) credit card facility would be compatible with the processing company. Whew! It was already getting complicated. I found out that the credit card processing company was compatible with a “real time” company called Cybercash http://www.cybercash.com Fortunately Cybercash is one of the biggest and best known “real time” credit card companies. They were recently bought by Verisign. Remember “real time credit card processing” is the method by which a customer puts their credit card information into your website and within about 15 seconds the money is heading toward your bank account with a confirmation of the order going to both you and the customer.
Here are the 5 or 6 elements that must work together:1. Your Bank
2. Your Bank's Credit Card Processing Company
3. The “Real Time” Credit Card Company
4. Your Shopping Cart
5. Your Web Host
6. Your associate program, if you have one
Although you could do it much quicker now, it took me several months to get the basic shopping cart and credit card system working, and a full six months to get the associate program working with the rest of the system. This down time equated to a tremendous loss of revenue and massive amounts of frustration because when things didn’t work, each of the above entities blamed the other. No one would take any responsibility to get things running smoothly. That’s why I will never put a system together piece by piece ever again. Too much money and time was wasted arguing back and forth with five different companies about why things wouldn’t work.
If you are technically oriented (which I'm not) and thick-skinned (which I am), you could tackle this yourself. I don't really recommend it though. It was just too tough and the system is so complicated now that's it's stifling some of my business plans. A little later I’ll tell you about a new system I found that cuts out all this work and frustration.